BEFORE the dust has even begun to settle from the battle over the so-called fiscal cliff in Washington there were indications over the weekend that the New Year's Eve showdown might have been a warm-up act.

The Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, fired some of the first shots on Sunday morning in the US, telling CBS's Face the Nation program that if parts of the government had to pare back services to deal with the debt limit, it would be the President's fault.

The President has already declared he would not negotiate over the debt limit.

Fighting over the debt limit - the legal authority Congress must grant the US government to pay its bills - was the cause of sweeping tax rises and automatic spending cuts Congress put in place that became known as the fiscal cliff.

Despite the Democratic victories in the election, many Republicans still see a refusal to increase the debt limit - which the government will hit in the next two months - as the best way to force significant spending cuts.

The last time Republicans threatened not to increase the limit much of the business and political establishment was shocked and ratings agencies cut America's AAA credit rating for the first time in history.

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Since then Democrats have advocated economic stimulus to charge the economy (and in the long run pay down the $16 trillion deficit) while Republicans have argued for austerity measures.

Further underscoring that gulf between the parties, Senator McConnell declared that Republicans would not countenance increasing government revenue whether by further tax increases or even closing tax exemption loopholes.

''The tax issue is finished, over, completed,'' he said on ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos. ''That's behind us. Now the question is what are we going to do about the biggest problem confronting our country and our future, and that's our spending addiction.''

The stakes are high. Should neither blink the American government would be in default and many services would shut down. The combined effects would cascade through the US and global economies.

The Brookings Institution's Tom Mann told Fairfax Media that one of the reasons the fiscal fights over the past administration were so dangerous was because the presence of Tea Party-backed Republican hardliners in the House of Representatives meant that this was the first time anyone truly believed a party could force the nation into default.

The President has warned that not only would he not negotiate over the debt ceiling, he would use both his inauguration speech and this year's State of the Union address to lay the blame at the feet of the Republican Party.

So far, polls suggest it is a political argument he would win.

On Sunday the Democratic House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, said the President had already given ground on revenue, and that the nation's fiscal problems could be solved only if the government took more.

''The President had originally said he wanted $1.6 trillion in revenue,'' she told Face the Nation. ''He took it down to $1.2 [trillion] … but that is not enough on the revenue side.''

Either way, last week's fight over legislation to provide aid to victims of hurricane Sandy shows just how high the demands on government revenue are.